You Are Dumb, which is not a blog, posts new columns when it can manage to in these troubled Trumpian times. It is also a Twitter feed, @youaredumb, with content in a similar vein but much shorter. For a take on what a blog by me would be like, check out OLDNERD.

December 22nd

NOTE: During the holiday stretch, I plan on posting mini-columns unless a topic really grabs me and I go long. We'll see how it goes.

Look, it's horrible that a crazy guy decided to go out by killing his ex-girlfriend and then two cops, but really, you're going to take advantage of it like this? ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"We've had four months of propaganda starting with the president that everybody should hate the police. The protests are being embraced, the protests are being encouraged. The protests, even the ones that don’t lead to violence, a lot of them lead to violence, all lead to a conclusion. The police are bad, the police are racist. That is completely wrong." - Rudy Giuliani, who was never America's Mayor, so fuck that noise.

And the media is following that lead up to a point. All of a sudden, even on ostensibly liberal but really establishment-lite MSNBC, there's been a desperate attempt to spin the protests as against "police policies", rather than police officers. Bullshit.

It's about police culture. Individual police officers may not be bad, individual police may not be racist, but police culture is insular, institutionally racist, and increasingly militaristic. This remains true, but I've been hearing all day that we shouldn't say so because two cops got murdered.

Fine. If that's the standard, let's apply it equally. Because last time I checked, whenever an African-American gets murdered by police, it's not considered tactless or insensitive to say horrible things about the black community as a whole, or black culture as a whole. In fact, it's considered a necessary part of the discourse by your Hannities and such.

And if even-handedly pointing out problems with police culture puts "blood on your hands", as the head of the police union put it, then I think we need to go back and have a long discussion with the people who coined and used the phrase "Second Amendment remedies" during the Tea Party movement and then said you can't blame that rhetoric for any anti-government violence that resulted.